With the development of Internet technology and the increase in functions provided to mobile equipment, chances are increasing to capture images by use of a portable terminal apparatus such as a mobile phone. Not only landscapes and people, but also panels displayed in various shows, which panels have explanation diagrams and descriptions displayed thereon, and furthermore slides displayed in an academic conference or the like are now being more regarded as a subject for image capture.
The panels displayed in various shows, which panels have explanation diagrams and descriptions displayed thereon, are at times exposed to light such as a spotlight, to make the panels more easily visible for the attendance. In a case where the subject is exposed to light, a person who is to capture an image usually determines its luminance as not particularly dark or bright and that image capture can be carried out without any problems. However, there are cases where in an image captured by a normal camera including a digital camera disclosed in Patent Literature 1, luminance in a part of the image which is locally exposed to the light of the spotlight or the like is much brighter than that in a part where the image is not exposed to the light.
In such a case, if an exposure condition (gain, aperture etc.) is adjusted so that visibility of a dark part is improved, a bright part often is overexposed. On the other hand, if the exposure condition is adjusted so that visibility of the bright part is improved, the dark part often loses shadow detail. Accordingly, unless the camera is highly functioned and a user of the camera has sufficient knowledge, it is difficult to capture an image so that the piece of captured image has good visibility and readability throughout its entire region.
Various studies have been performed to improve quality of captured images; one example of this is an image capture apparatus disclosed in Patent Literature 2. This image capture apparatus extracts location information of a subject by comparing (i) still image data obtained by carrying out image capture with use of no test flash and (ii) still image data obtained by carrying out image capture with use of a test flash. This comparison allows emitting an appropriate amount of light from the flash to a region indicated by the location information, so as to obtain a finalized captured image.